The Matazone blog

A bit of beginner’s info: whenever you type a name of a website into your browser, such as matazone.co.uk, your computer has a look at what is called the DNS list. This list links together names of websites with their IP address. The IP address is a series of numbers telling your computer where the information for that domain is stored. In other words, it’s the way to find the server where the website resides.

Since the beginning of the internet DNS has been run by the US. All of the DNS admin, and I assume the money charged for it, occured in the US for every country around the world. Understandably, with the internet being of massive importance to almost every nation on the planet, for commerce in the west and for communication in developing countries, quite a lot of places would like to have some more say about how DNS is run.

Guess what? The US isn’t very happy about this idea, but it looks like it’s going to happen anyway.

Nevertheless with just one day remaining, the pressure to seal a deal is intense, and it looks increasingly likely that by 5pm Swiss time on Friday 30th September 2005, the Unites States will be negotiated out of control of the internet.

This is actually a very important event in the history of the internet. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens next.

Full article here.

This is quite interesting, if you like this sort of thing. Wild mountain gorillas have been seen using tools for the first time in the wild, and not just for finding food either.

Here‘s a great series of photos showing a female gorilla wading across a river, getting waist-deep, then going back to the edge to find a stick to check out the depth in front of her as she crosses.

I think this is great because it shows once again that it’s not only human who have the ability for abstract thought. In particular this is significant because the use of the stick wasn’t to getting food but simply to make her life easier and safer. This is precisely the kind of thing that early humans must have done. It’s very easy to imagine an ancestor or ours poking their way across a river, deciding that they have a good stick, holding on to it, and beginning to find other uses for it. What these photos show is a scene that has probably happened millions of times before, but we’ve never witnessed its like in other creatures. Fantastic.

Full article here.

When it comes to learning Flash, I’m a big fan of the Friends of ED books. My favourite is an oldie but a goodie, Flash MX Most Wanted Effects & Movies UK link US link, in particular the tutotial on SoFake.com (which is a lovely little website, with some great design feaures, in particular the use of sound is lovely).

Anyway, the publisher of the Friends of ED books, Apress, also make many other books about (less exciting ) computer things like PHP, Java, .NET, etc blah blah rhubarb. They’ve come up with a funky little Firefox extension that allows you to highlight a phrase on the web, right click and do an automatic search of their library for books related to that subject. I think it could be pretty handy when you’re looking to find info about programming and/or Flash. If you think so to then you can download it here: http://www.apress.com/misc/firefox/

The new version of Flash is out, and it is seriously cool. I’ve been playing with some of the features on it, but other people are way ahead of me. Check out this:

http://www.symphonyplanet.com/glenrhodes/wolf/myRay.html

It’s a Flash based version of the original first-person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D. Flash has come a long way!

You’ll need the latest version of Flash player for it to work. I’ll be interested to hear whether you get automatically prompted to download it and what your experience is of the upgrade. Obviously I’d like to begin publishing for Flash player 8 pretty soon, so I need to know how smoothly the upgrade process goes.

It’s been a week for huge things, firstly Pac-Man, then the bunny on a moutainside, and now the first pictures of a giant squid in its natural habitat.

small pics
bigger (but less) pics

When I was a child I wanted to be a deep-sea diver. Then I read about giant squid and changed my mind.

These pictures are massively important to the study of the creatures because no-one has ever seen one alive before. Okay, so this poor creature spent the entire time trying to rip itself off a hook and eventually lost an arm to escape (I’m pretty sure they grow back though), so it’s not a completely natural example of giant squid behaviour, but they do show that the squid actively hunt rather than drifting, as was previously thought. This also lends some credence to the old stories of giant squid attacking small vessels… Not much credence admittedly, because giant squid aren’t generally seen out of the deep ocean, but it does show that they can hunt when they want to.

*shudder*

They still creep me out though. There’s something very scary about squid and octopi. I think it’s a very instinctive fear on two levels: fear of something so utterly different, and fear of something intelligent and strong. Octopi are among the smartest creatures that we know of, with unusually large brains. No-one’s quite sure why they need such large brains. Some have suggested that it’s to control all the limbs, but I think they’re planning to build sea-water containing robots to come and destroy us all.

Oh, if anyone can find a better source for the pictures I’d be happy to see them, these were the best I could find. Some news sources told you about the great new pictures and didn’t even include a single one of them!

EDIT: I’ve found some decent pictures:

National Geographic

We’ve all come to know and love the random word three line poems put out into the ether by Digi-Shakespeare. Well… I have anyway, but now, what’s this? A five line poem? Has DS decided on a new form, or is this another DS?

raised near cant blue shining immediate
strange important interest age progress modern glad girls
summary filled again full appearance news burst
reference girls twenty-one use miss
within fascinate music ground oh

It’s a pretty complex tangle of images here. I like the phrase ‘modern glad girls’, but it also hints that DS feels isolated from them. Maybe DS is shy? Is ‘music ground’ a disco? Or is that reference to the news something darker, that these people DS is writing about are only in the media? Like desert sands, finality of interpretation is tricky to find here.

Yes, this is precisely as it sounds, the Italians have made a huge bunny. Hurrah!

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1541732.html

It’s 200 feet long and has been placed by a group of artists on a mountainside in the Piedmont region of Italy where it is intended to remain for the next twenty years.

The thing that troubles me about this is that it’s knitted. Do knitted items usually survive for 20 years on the side on mountains? The artists want people to climb onto it and relax, but surely it will get wet pretty easily and take a long time to dry out at an altitude of 5,000 feet? I’m not sure that they’ve thought this through.

There is also the possibility that human civilisation will end before the bunny is removed, prompting future archaeologists of the next earth civilisation to wonder what bizarre end-times cult tried to stave off the end of the world by building a huge bunny.

Am I the only person who sees things like this and wonders what future archaeologists will make of it all? We’ve probably destroyed the chances that decent written records will survive through the adoption of computers for nearly everything, so all they’ll have to go on is a multitude of plastic bags and giant bunny fibre remains.

Apparently there are 650 mountain gorillas left in the wild.

Given the number of gorilla costumes in the world, especially those used by gorilla-gram messengers, that may mean that at any one point there are more people impersonating gorillas than there are real ones alive outside of zoos. How strange.

Oh those wacky Japanese, now they’re making American crops look like their characters! What will they think of next?

Or something.

But seriously, there’s a huge Pac-man in the middle of the US, check it out on Google Earth:

36°58’25.88″n, 101°32’49.54″W

(Or get a satellite photo from Google Maps).

I will be disappointed if farmers don’t start cropping their fields into the shape of Space Invaders next year.

Maybe there could be a new advertising market for adverts designed to be visible in satellite photos? You could park a van with an advert on its roof next to a monument, wait until the satellite photo is updated then move on somewhere else… Of course you could be waiting a long time unless you worked out how to predict when the photos are being taken. Even so, as an idea I think it’s got potential!

Well, I was waiting for it, at least.

I’ve not heard from DS for a long time and I was beginning to suspect that the code running it had been tragically wiped from the hidden files of people’s machines as they finally discovered that running anti-spyware software was a good idea. It appears that this hasn’t happened. DS has survived the blitz and has returned to my junk-mail box with its trusty mispelt names of drugs as a subject line (‘CeIebrex, Cia111is, Viagr., Levitr, Paxi1, ZanafIex, Va11ium, Ambbien, Zyban, S@MA, Meriddia, Nexium, ZoIoft, Xana. wanted’) and an attachment that I will never open.

I’ve no idea what this poem is on about though:

profession turning whom make immediate
thats wife very parents speaking whom
reply happened young my profession gym

It’s almost like it’s just a selection of random words… Welcome back DS!

For those who’ve known me for many years, you’ll know that I love the Burning Man festival. Basically it’s a big gathering of strange people in the desert. Some say it’s a huge interactive art installation, others an experiment in spontaneous social engineering, and others say it’s just a big party. It’s definitely all of those and many, many more things too.

I went over there in 1999 and 2002 but couldn’t afford to go this year, which is a real shame because some of the art looks fantastic. Here’s a few selections of photos (all pages may contain some nudity):

http://www.lennyjones.net/burn2005/comicbook2005.htm
This one not only has masses of images that capture some of the bizarre daily events of the place but it also has some silky smooth presentation. Definitely worth a visit.

http://www.moonski.net/burningman/index.html
Rick Egan has been taking Burning Man photos for years. Here’s one from this year that I like:

http://www.moonski.net/burningman/bm2005/pages/12.html

There’s something very spiritual about the desert that forces you to adjust your perception of yourself. Take away your normal home, your normal belongings, your job, and normal survival conditions and you find that you live your days in a different way. Sometimes you find yourself not watching a sunset but standing in a sunset, and that’s a whole new experience. I can’t tell you in words how it is, but it just is.

http://www.webbery.com/galleries/burningman/index.html
Patrick Roddie is another regular photographer at the burn. He makes series’ of photographs based on actions or body parts. His portraits are especially good, capturing something beautiful in every face:
http://www.webbery.com/galleries/burningman/bm05/faces/index.html
Although this one also caught my eye as something representative of the event’s spirit:
http://www.webbery.com/galleries/burningman/bm05/dance/source/05-0826.html

Enjoy the photos!

About 50% of people blog for therapy. Weird.

It may be relevant that the poll was made in the US, but that’s still a startlingly high amount of people.

Rest assured that I don’t treat this blog as therapy. I’m really not sure what it is… I guess it’s just a way of keeping something new happening on my site between animations. Animations take lots of time, but blogging is quick and easy. I suppose that means that this blog counts as entertainment, suggesting that I do this for fame, which is equally odd, because I’ve got rather strange tastes in topics if I’m trying to get famous off of this. Hmm.

apparently…

Another gem from The Register for you.

Almost two-thirds of Swedes secretly read their partner’s SMS messages

Almost half of British women, 45 per cent, owned up to secretly checking their partner’s messages, compared to 31 per cent of men

I’m not sure what any of this proves, other than I find pointless surveys interesting. I’ve never secretly checked anyone’s SMS log, and frankly the idea had never even occured to me. I figure trust breeds trust. It’s a strange world where people will go to bed with people that they don’t trust, where mobile phones are considered to be better representations of a person’s true self than the words they say to you. The world of digital identity is something that is appearing all through mainstream people’s lives with modern technology and no-one is noticing a thing. I’m really not sure if I like that or not… Somehow I feel that maybe we should have a more integrated identity, so we don’t need to be someone else online, in text messages, on the phone, in emails, on forums, etc.

Maybe we just need more honesty. Ann Kaloski wrote an essay in 1997 called Bisexuals Making Out with Cyborgs: Politics, Pleasure, Con/fusion in which she looked at the way that virtual identities mean that sex-play online may be, for example, allow heterosexual women to have sex with other women, but those other women may be a man pretending to be a woman. There were two things I found very interesting in the essay, firstly that people usually didn’t actually care what the physical sex of their partner was, only their virtual sex, and secondly that many people found that their online personalities gave them confidence to be more assertive in life. I don’t have time to get into the full details of the meaning of these findings, but they certainly gave me something interesting to ponder on.

World of Warcraft, the online multiplayer game, is in serious problems.

Last week they put in a new quest for the game involving a big baddie who could cast a very nasty spell on your character that gave them a disease. This spell would instantly kill most characters, but not quite all. Survivors of the spell finished the quest or escaped and have now gone out into the general world and are (probably non-intentionally) infecting other characters controlled by players all over the world. For anyone who isn’t strong enough this means near-instant death, and the survivors then become contagious.

It’s all pretty nasty stuff. Some people spend a very long time building their characters, and now it’s like an outbreak of air-transmitted Ebola has hit the game, decimating the population.

It was once observed about computers that the more intelligent and complex they were made, the less possible it became to predict precisely how they would react to all circumstances. The World of Warcraft game has become sufficiently complex that disease has spontaneously found a way to escape the predictions of its programmers with devastating consequences. It’s just another case where our technology has escaped from our own control.

All this, coming to a Michael Crichton plot near you soon… (US link UK link)

More info here.

Here’s an interesting one for you. Back in the 1990s a Catholic seminarian molested three children. He’s currently on the run. So far, so sad-but-unsurprising.

The interesting bit is that a court case has now been raised in the US naming the former Cardinal Ratzinger (who at the time ran the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), who is now Pope Benedict XVI, and several others as being part of a conspiracy to conceal the abuse. Previously such cases have been dismissed by US courts because the Pope is the head of state of the Holy See, and US law gives heads of state immunity from prosecution for reasons of international harmony (I assume). As such it would seem that the case can’t go any further.

This is where it gets really interesting: they’ve tried this before and failed, but in that response the Vatican named itself as a church, and the First Amendment has a clause that bars laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” As such, because the Vatican and the Holy See has now established that it is a church, not a state, the new case can go ahead.

Obviously this is a very serious matter, but I find myself very intrigued by the religious ramifications for Catholicism if the Pope is prosecuted. What does it mean for a faith if their envoy of God on the earth is convicted of attempting to conceal child abuse? The concealment is argued to be because the Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a letter saying that child abuse would be dealt with by the church itself without need for external influence, in other words they wouldn’t tell the authorities. How far would mainstream Catholicism stick with their support for this defence if their leader is prosecuted for it? Would a new pope be selected? It’s interesting stuff. To be honest, I’d be very surprised if this got any further than an attempt, I suspect that higher levels of the US government would step in to prevent prosecution of the Pope, but the possibility is nonetheless thought provoking.

More info here.

Actually, it’s not spam, but now you can see where lots of spam is coming from. Hurrah for the spam map!

http://mailinator.com/mailinator/map.html

By utilising the power of clever doohickies, this company has combined the IP address data from spam-generating machines with Google maps to create a map of where the most spam in the world is coming from. How cool is that?

Okay… Maybe I’m just easily impressed, but still, I think it’s pretty clever.

It’s worth remembering that these are most likely zombie PCs infected with junk that makes them send out spam without the owner knowing anything about it. On which subject, I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating, make sure that your PC is scanned regularly for hidden junk:

Download Ad-Aware

Download ‘Spybot Search & Destroy’

Run them once a week (or more) to keep your computer happy and non-zombified.

So what’s big in Venezuelan spam right now? “looking for that special bedroom buddy” has been sent out 1,600 times from IP address 200.11.242.161 , and remember, with the spam lottery, it could be you next!

Speaking of which, I’ve not heard from Digital Shakespeare for a while. Oh no, maybe it’s been deleted!

It does exactly what it says on the thread title, yarr, so it does.

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

It be the day to talk like a pirate, so shiver yer timbers an’ those o’ yer ship-mates otherwise I’ll keel-haul yer sorry land lubbing arse.

Do pirates say ‘arse’? Probably not.

Yarr!

Have fun.

Yarr?

While I’m here, get your pirate name:

http://gangstaname.com/pirate_name.php

Mine is Pirate Harley the Cash-Strapped, which be fair accurate, so it be.

A friend of mine in the US mentioned this place to me, and it sounds extremely peculiar.

The Mystery Spot.

Apparently gravity leans in a different direction there. No-one is sure quite why this happens, but it seems to be a reliable effect. Very odd. Has anyone been there? I’d love to hear some first-hand reports of the place.

A chap in Australia was wearing a particular combination of man-made fibres and managed to generate 30,000 volts of static electricity, causing serious problems for the place where it discharged itself:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/16/static_jacket/

I don’t know about you, but this has huge potential to me. We could all wear this stuff then syphon it off into the national power supply. Wear it at the gym and then use the electricity to watch a bit of TV when you get home… Alternatively it could become a bizarre form of industrial espionage: banks could employ people to innocently discharge 30,000 volts into the cash machines of competitors. The possibilities are endless!